"LSI
has shipped well over 10 million
SandForce processors
and we anticipate our shipment volumes will continue to increase, driven by the
exploding demand and lowering price points for NAND flash technology," said
Thad Omura,
VP of marketing, Flash Components Division, LSI.

Editor's
comments:- last week I asked LSI if the power saving feature was related in
any way to adaptive
DSP care. I haven't got an answer yet - so it may be the answer is No.

On the other hand maybe they're waiting for the
Flash Memory Summit (in 3 weeks
time) before they say more about their adaptive write DSP IP roadmap.

LSI/SandForce
have shipped over 10 million SSD controllers - since
2010 - and
they're currently shipping over 1 million per month.Seagate names new VP SSD

Editor:- July 30, 2012 -
After 6 years at other companies Gary Gentry
has rejoined Seagate
to lead its SSD business as senior VP SSD.

Editor's
comments:- If you want to see what I've said recently about these 2
companies - from the angle of the SSD market - just click on their profiles.

There are many possible interpretations of what this (and other recent
rumors) may mean. The simplest is that Seagate is taking the enterprise SSD
market more seriously.new blog - the Survive and Thrive Guide to Enterprise SSDs

Editor:-
July 30, 2012 - I've already written and researched many different types of
guides to the enterprise SSD market. Is it possible to say everything important
in 1 set of bullet points? Maybe.... You can see the result in my new blog
today -
Enterprise
SSDs - Survive and Thrive Guide.some VCs like their storage startups Nimble and Pure

It's
nice if your mother or your VC likes you. An old friend of mine, Ross King, used to
classify the way that most
VCs prefer to do
their market research
as BOGSAT - because VCs don't like to waste money and think they know market
trends better than a bunch of desk / trade-show research monkeys.

If
and when either of these SSD companies gets enough of your attention they might
get into a more
significant similar sized list.intrinsic temperature related data rot in flash SSDs... a new
blog by WD

Editor:- July 26, 2012 - Back in February 2009 - on
this very page - I started talking about the Jekyll & Hyde personality of
flash SSDs - specifically in the context of Data Remanence vs Permanence.

What
I meant was that the
apps use case is
what determines whether an intrinsic physical attribute is good or bad.

Retaining
stored data is a good thing in an always powered enterprise SSD array - and
you may have thought that maintaining this aspect of
data integrity
in so called "non-volatile" memory like flash was a
no-brainer.

But enterprise SSD designers have long known that they
can't rely on physics alone. That's why you have "healing cycles"
which pro-actively work their way through the flash array to repair data rot -
which otherwise would accumulate and become irrecoverable.

One of the
seldom advertised beneficial side effects of pro-active
endurance
management cycles BTW is that they suck up data from unworn out blocks
- which from an apps view haven't changed and are "at rest" - and
while shunting that data into a less new physical location - also detect and
correct silent errors.

Intuitively users know that temperature comes
into this somewhere too. But how fast (if left to itself) does flash data rot at
different temperatures?

These factors affect every user of SSDs - but
industrial SSD users are most at risk - because the period of operating
temperature stress is longer than in other markets - and embedded industrial
SSDs can't afford the type of
high availability
architectures of the enterprise world.

Eli Tiomkin's useful table lets
you look up the SSD storage temperature and see how much more quickly the
native flash will corrupt - if a suitable
controller or healing
process isn't in place to detect changes and fix them....read
the articleAnother $25 million funding for Tintri

Editor:- July
24, 2012 - hybrid NAS rackmount
SSD ASAP maker Tintri today
announced
it has closed a $25 million funding round which brings the company's total
capital raised to over $60 million. Booting up a dialog about the future of PCIe SSDs

AutoCache ($999
for cache sizes less than 500GB) reduces bottlenecks in virtualized servers to
increase VM density, efficiency and performance. The company says it can
increase VM density upto 3x with absolutely no impact on IT operations.

Editor's comments:- here are some questions I asked about the
new product - and the answers I got from Rich Pappas,
Proximal's VP of sales and business development.

Editor:- How long
does it take for the algorithms to reach peak efficiency?

Pappas:- It varies by workload, but typically it takes about 15
minutes for the cache to warm to reach peak efficiency.

Editor:- Is
the caching only on reads, or is it effective on writes too?

Pappas:-
AutoCache will only cache reads, but by virtue of relieving the backend
datastore from read traffic, we have actually seen overall write performance
improvements as well. This effect is also dependent on the workload.
CRN's Top SSDs List

Editor:- July 23, 2012 - Many
publications which discuss the
consumer SSD market
seem to be devoid of any intellectual, rational or business analysis.

A good example is
CRN's
recent article - which is entitled "the 10 Coolest SSDs Of 2012 (So
Far)" - which simply lists a bunch of SSD pictures (1 on each page)
without any coherent argument given for their selection that I could see.

If you're the one paying for those useless ads - in that null content zone - I
hope your career gets better in the future and you can put this period of
consumer tainted SSD darkness behind you.Seagate's rumored proposal to OCZ

Editor:- July 20,
2012 - In the past few days there have been rumors flying across the web
speculating on a story that Seagate might buy
OCZ.

I
didn't mention it in these pages before - because the original valuations which
were being quoted by a site called Fudzilla.com were so low - that I didn't
give them any credence. And as I've already written a lot about both the
headlined companies recently there's nothing more I can usefully add at this
time.

When you look at the numbers of
companies involved - there are thousands of plausible pairing permutations.
And at the right price many things are possible.

I always tell wannabe
SSD company acquirers that after they have assembled their wish lists - it's
pragmatic to prioritize companies in the
Top SSD Companies list
in their shorlists. SEC revisits 2009 SSD History in suit against STEC's CEO

The SEC says this is in connection with the timing of sales
of stock holdings in
2009.

Among
other things - SEC says about its complaint...

"STEC's stock
price increased more than 8x from January to August 2009 as the company
reported higher revenues, sales, and margins for its products, particularly its
flagship flash memory product called "ZeusIOPS". The stock rise also
came on the heels of STEC's July 2009 announcement of a unique agreement with
its largest customer,
EMC which agreed to buy
$120 million worth of ZeusIOPS in the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2009.

SEC
alledges that "Moshayedi touted the sales growth of ZeusIOPS and said the
agreement with EMC was "part of the expected growth" for STEC going
forward."

Among other things- STEC's press release says - the
Commission has notified the Company that it would not bring an enforcement
action against the company or any of its other executive officers. Also - a
spokeperson for the company expressed confidence that the allegations will be
seen to be without merit.

Editor's comments:- although this
relates to old happenings in SSD market - many investors were surprised and
annoyed when they lost money by following what they had assumed to be safe
bets in STEC's SSD outlook.

This is one of those stories where a
single letter (the difference between STEC and SEC) can make a lot of difference
to the meaning. I'm reminded of what Winston Churchill wrote in his history of
the 2nd World War. He said that when discussing the Middle East - his staff kept
mixing up Iraq and Iran. So to avoid mixups he decided for planning purposes
they should refer to Iran as "Persia".

In
3 to 5 years time all enterprise storage infastucture will be solid state -
but due to economic necessities it will still be segmented into different types
by speed and function - as I described in my
SSD silos article -
even when it's all solid state.

I predict that when that happens -
AWS's marketers may choose to describe its lowest speed storage as "HDD
like" - even when it's SSD - in order to convey to customers what it's
about. It takes a long time for people to let go of old ideas. Remember
Virtual Tape Libraries?Micron in volume production of 1Gb PCM

Editor:- July
18, 2012 - Micron
today
announced
it was the 1st company to be in volume production of Phase Change Memory
(PCM).

The company's 45nm memories have upto 1Gb in a multichip
package.

Editor's comments:- PCM fans will get excited about
this.

But before we get carried away on a tidal wave of PCM SSD
speculation let's recall the reason we still use flash to implement the bulk
storage capacity in nearly all SSDs (despite flash's many
defects and
complex ramifications).

PCM
can be viable as an alternative to battery backed
RAM in the
cache part of a
flash SSD. Some SSD oems have already done that. But PCM's storage density
is too low to replace flash in mainstream SSD applications for at least the next
3 years.

You can read more about various nvm technologies which were
going to make flash obsolete (including details of the 1st PCM PCIe SSD which
was unveiled a year ago) in my article
flash SSD's past phantom
demonsDell launches storage VC fund

Editor:- July 17, 2012
-
A
report in CNNMoney says Dell is launching an
investment fund for early stage storage startups.

Editor's
comments:- The tranches of money on offer (3 to 5 million dollars) seem
quite small by SSD IP startup standards today - but that could buy Dell a
useful chunk of an early stage
SSD software company -
for example.

When I think of vendors who have already invested in SSD
companies Intel and
Samsung are the first
which spring to mind. See also:-VCs in SSDs and storage.when there's no SSD news - another benchmark record

Editor:-
July 17, 2012 - When companies don't have anything new to say about their
technology, revenue, or funding rounds - their PRs manufacture benchmark /
partner / customer success story news.

Just
showing you I'm still awake. My real work is being done on other pages today.
Something which really is newsworthy might land on this page a little later.new edition of the Top SSD Companies

Editor:- July
16, 2012 - 2 new companies shot straight up from stealth mode into the ranks
of the top SSD companies that readers followed up in the last quarter. The
new edition of the Top 20
SSD Companies tells you who they are - and analyzes the technology and
business stresses affecting the established SSD market leaders. ...read the articleOverland enters SSD ASAP market

Roy DCruz -
Skyera's VP of Array Systems comes to Skyera from iTools. Before that DCruz
was principle engineer at Brocade,
contributing to the architecture of
FCoE and storage
services. His career also spans
Nishan Systems,
Andiamo and
Cisco.

This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible.

I'm sure, more than anyone, you have the widest audience range
visiting your site because you really are the industry expert so everyone from
an analyst to a VC to an IT guy wants to see what you have to say.

I
still remember the first day I stumbled on on your site and thought 'haha what
is this site, never heard of it' and then within minutes I realized you can't
judge a book by its cover...it's the most thorough and thought-out overview of
the storage market by far!"